Terra Nullius

by Claire G. Coleman

  Sergeant Rohan smirked. So like engineers, builders, shopkeepers – everybody who has little contact with Natives. Civilians. He wanted to spit the word, spit in their faces.

  ‘Why did you not pursue?’ He loved asking that question, loved the terrified, embarrassed, ashamed expressions on their pathetic faces. There was no answer that was not embarrassing.

  ‘How did the ghost, or Native,’ Sergeant Rohan smirked, ‘get into the middle of your camp anyway?’ He was not pleased; another message had dragged him to the crossroads when he should have been looking for Jacky.

  ‘That’s why it must have been a ghost,’ exclaimed the man who had discovered the looting. ‘No Native would have, could have slipped in here!’

  ‘Could it have been the Native known as Jacky?’ That was a more interesting question: Jacky was almost a ghost, they had read about him in the news, everyone was talking of him yet nobody had seen him. If nobody could catch Jacky he was a perfect excuse; being robbed by Jacky was not so embarrassing. Potential fame, certain forgiveness for the incident awaited.

  ‘Yes,’ the trooper replied with a half-coy, half-smug smile, ‘it could have been Jacky.’

  Chapter 8

  The gun and the word

  The word and the gun

  They cannot stand alone, for each is only half

  Each leans on the other

  And their tower is made strong.

  – Anonymous

  Bagra read the letter from home feeling her anger rise, feeling the heat of it. Showing her anger was a luxury she allowed only now, safe and alone, isolated in the comfortable quiet of her room. How could they, how dare they criticise her work, her mission, these men who had never even been here, who had doubtlessly never even left home? How could they believe they even had the right? How could they think they knew what was going on? They had never even set foot on the hot dry ground here let alone actually met and spoken to a Native.

  Nevertheless, they had written and they clearly believed they had the right to complain.

  ‘Most esteemed Sister Bagra,’ the letter began, ‘we have received reports from your mission that have filled us with grave concerns, not only for its future, but indeed for its very fitness to continue. We can only continue to hope such claims are spurious; we believe such claims cannot possibly be true but unfortunately we have an obligation to investigate.

  ‘We might have simply taken your word in your reply to this letter that we await anxiously, yet we cannot as questions have been asked of us by the government back here, questions that suggest they have received reports similar to what we received.’

  She stared at the letter with disgust. She did not know who had sent these excremental reports to the Church and to the government back home but she would find out. She could not send them home when she found them, but she could make them so uncomfortable, the situation so intolerable that they would beg to leave. When, finally, their torment was complete, when they begged in tears to go home, she would not give in to their wishes.

  She would keep them there, where they no longer wanted to be once she had made them hate the place even more than she did.

  ‘There have been complaints,’ the disgusting letter continued, ‘of the systematic use of unacceptably cruel punishment by your nuns and especially by you. It has also been said, in those same complaints, that Natives have been tortured and starved to death, deaths which have been covered up as a matter of course. These complaints surely cannot be true, yet because the government is now involved, we have an obligation to investigate fully.

  ‘We are confident that these complaints are unfounded, that an investigation will prove this to be true. A senior member of the Church has been dispatched on the same ship as this letter to perform such an investigation. There will likely be delay in his arrival at your mission as the information we received also suggested a tradition of cruelty towards Natives, across the entire colony. Additionally, it is believed that some mission schools in the colony are preparing their students for nothing more than a life of servitude, of slavery.’

  Sister Bagra hissed like a reptile into the silence of her room before she could stop herself.

  ‘The Church, as you know, stands adamantly with the government against the enslavement of any member of an intelligent race. Evidence suggests that the Natives there indeed have enough intelligence to preclude their slavery under our law. If indeed slavery exists in the colony everybody here would be most disappointed. Our laws and morality would demand we take some sort of appropriate action.

  ‘We are confident our investigator will find no evidence of slavery; surely such claims must be untrue. He will leave the city after his investigation in the Colonial Administration offices and arrive there at the mission to clear this up as soon as safe transportation across the colony can be arranged.’

  For a moment it seemed like Bagra was going to give in to an Earth-shattering rage, throw the letter to the pristine floorboards and storm around the mission buildings. How dare they? If they only set one foot down in this place, lived here a day even, they would discover as she had that the savages here were completely and utterly unsuited to civilisation. She wanted to scream insults into the air, in the hope they would make it home, but that would never do. She must not be seen to lose her temper.

  Instead she forced herself to be calm, to think.

  Who could have managed to send a letter to the Church back home, to the government, without her getting an inkling? She was again forced to fight back her rage at the thought. Cruelty? How could it be cruelty? Anyone who has trained animals would surely know that only a firm hand can teach them, that there is no use reasoning with animals. Even little children must be disciplined – a slap was so much more effective than any number of reasoned explanations. The Natives, never willingly growing away from their savagery, were animals. At most they were children. The only way to help them was to use training methods appropriate to what they were.

  Who could it have been? She dragged her thoughts back there, somewhere they would be useful, somewhere she could do her sanity some good. If she could find who reported to home she could at least take her consternation out on them. She smiled at that, a small tight smile.

  They would certainly have a long time to regret what they had done.

  Jacky was used to hunger, had been hungry before, but always before there had been a chance of something to eat, something to steal from the kitchens. He did not really know how to survive out there in the wilds. Maybe that was why so many people ended up at the mission, there was not enough food there but at least there was some.

  The food he had stolen from the camp had fed him for a couple of days, only because he had stayed hungry, never quite eating his fill. The flour had turned out to be a disappointment, a ridiculous mistake. He had lost more than half of it in his mad, panicked run, leaving a flour trail even a blind Settler could follow in the dark. What was left was useless without water, and without the fire he could not risk lighting. The dried meat, overly salty, had done nothing more than make him unbearably thirsty, and water was, as always, in short supply. Only the dried fruit was really worth the effort, the risk. He chewed some slowly, to make it last longer, as he walked.

  It had been a long couple of days, knowing he had made such a commotion, knowing the Settlers had even more reason to hunt him down once he robbed them so brazenly, knowing that the trail of flour had made it easier to find him. His terror had been constant and almost crippling. He had, in the end, been forced to shake himself, to slow down so he could travel as carefully as he knew he should. When he had left such an obvious trail it was important to ensure that trail ended somewhere. It had taken all his skill, all his instinct to ensure the obvious trail would become a dead end.

  Care made him slower, care used more energy per mile, care was tiring. That was why care made him hungrier, made it all harder. In the end he had w
alked himself to a standstill; this place was as good as any.

  He was outside a small Settler town, though it looked big enough to him, hiding in the shadows of the stunted trees, avoiding everybody. He was even hiding from the sprawling, untidy Native camp and the campies within it. He watched all day, in the shade, not moving as the sun wheeled overhead, keeping cool, barely avoiding dehydration. There was no safe way in that he could see, no way to the food or water. Everywhere he looked were Settlers going about their business, alert, prepared, paranoid.

  All day he lay there, most of the night he lay there; at least the night brought some relief, cooler than it was in the day. He was still just as thirsty but at least it was no longer getting rapidly worse; it was almost bearable. There was, however, no relief from the gnawing, relentless hunger. Now, also, he was feeling the cold. Barely dressed, running away with nothing, he had no protection from the weather.

  In the cold the hungry get even hungrier, the starving starve to death.

  Lights moved slowly around the township like embers; not many but enough to inform Jacky that the Settlers were alert. Somewhere in there a guard, a sentry, a trooper, or a police officer, a sheriff – who knows, hopefully not more than one of them – was keeping his eye out for interlopers, was arresting the drunk and the destitute, keeping the campies in their camp out of the town. All the buildings were well lit, as if by keeping lights on they could keep the Natives out of their town. It was working. Jacky could see no way in.

  Moving carefully in the dark, there was no light to see by but desperation drove him on. Jacky navigated his way around the town, searching for a way in. He came finally upon a shallow depression in his path, a shallow depression filled with the trash of the town. On the far side he could see the fires and moving figures of a Native camp – just beyond, adjacent to and almost within the garbage dump. There, within the putrid smell of the town’s garbage, lived the last dispirited Natives in that area; their shabby dwellings almost inseparable to the eye from the garbage heap. Jacky picked his careful way down into the garbage, trying, fearfully, not to alert anyone, even those in the Native camp. His own people lived there but there was no way to know whether or not they would be inclined to help him. So destitute, they might even betray him to the Settlers for a reward as small as a scrap of bread. They might even betray him for as little as the dream of a scrap of bread. They were probably desperate enough.

  He wished he could approach the camp, talk to the campies but he could not risk betrayal. He was desperate for the company of his own people – that desire tore at his gut as much as the hunger did. Yet he did not, could not, approach them. His fear might have been unfounded but it was his fear, and all his life his fears had kept him alive.

  The moon had risen, a yellow half-moon that would not be enough to see by except that Jacky had been lying in complete darkness and his eyes had adjusted. Even then it was a slow dangerous crawl, over who knew what disgusting trash – over rotting food, over sharp, fragmented, broken goods.

  The smell was a constant, unwelcome companion. Jacky hoped it would not stick to him too badly; he almost laughed at the idea of the Settlers tracking him by the smell of their refuse. His nose wrinkled until his sense of smell started to shut down, like an eye blinded by too much light. The stench was strong but no longer unbearable.

  In the faintly blue darkness he found the newest trash, the part of the tip closest to the town. Someone had dumped a sack of who knew what, not yet putrid, or at least relatively low in stench. The sack was not even torn. Jacky opened it, emptied it, hoping there would be no noise, nothing to reveal his presence. There was a bottle, unbroken, empty, a treasure beyond the imagining of anyone who had never been thirsty. Jacky slipped it into the hungry open mouth of his new-old sack.

  His sense of smell, heightened by hunger and the darkness, started his mouth watering, despite the pervading smell of rot that surrounded him. His mouth dripped before he was consciously aware of what his stomach was smelling. There, in the trash tumbling around his knees, was a bone – remains of someone’s dinner, with a few scraps of meat still on it. So hungry, so desperate he gnawed the meat off that bone and swallowed a half-rotten piece of fruit right where he was kneeling in that aromatic mess.

  There were noises out there, in the trash. Jacky’s fears rose at the knowledge there was something unknown, unseen, in there with him; something that might or might not be dangerous. Whatever it was, it too was eating; he could hear trash tumble as it searched, hear what sounded like licking and slurping and the sharp crunch of bird bones splintering. With a will he didn’t even know he possessed he pushed down his fear to at least a manageable level.

  Hopefully it would be nothing more than a cat, or a feral dog, maybe a large lizard of some sort. He had seen all three of those animals, along with rats and crows, in the trash pits at the station where he had been too long a slave. Once he had even seen a wild, escaped pig; that was the most dangerous thing that would dig through trash, besides humans. Pigs were uncommon – Jacky hoped like hell it was not one. It was coming closer, rummaging in the filth, crunching more bones. Rather than risk a confrontation, Jacky grabbed a hunk of mouldy bread lying right next to his hand, and ran.

  It was still too dark to run, even attempting it was a mistake, one that was almost fatal for poor Jacky. He stumbled and tripped over something large, inanimate and immovable, falling on his face then rolling over something even more putrid-smelling than the things around it. Something broke underneath him as he rolled, something that cracked like shattering glass, unpleasantly reminding him of the window at the school. The bread fell from his hand, something indescribably foul-smelling and sticky glued itself onto his face.

  There was a sudden outcry from the Natives’ camp; lights, torches and fires flared on, voices yelled. It filled the dreadful silence, the void left when Jacky stopped tumbling. Voices were coming his way from the camp, clattering and crunching through the mess, shouting, crying out when they tripped, when they stumbled. They were speaking the language of his parents; he recognised the tone of it even though he could not identify words in that jumble.

  From the adjacent town came the sound of people rousing, either woken by his dangerous, noisy tumble or by the cries from the Native camp. It didn’t matter which – it was almost too late to run. Jacky scrambled for his sack, thankfully close at hand, and desperately, hungrily searched for the dropped bread.

  Finding it, he wiped the disgusting, sticky goo from it, and shouldering his sack, Jacky ran as if his life was the prize in a race. Fear made him careless, being chased made him careless; luck, or something else unfathomable kept him, for that moment, safe. He sprinted, staggered and stumbled, almost fell, found his feet, again and again yet somehow this time kept his feet under him. Behind him he could hear the shouts, jeers and swearing of the Natives from the camp. Further behind them and to the left could be heard the shouts of the Settlers, awakened and not happy about it.

  Some time later – it might have been an hour – he lay on his belly on the pushed-down reeds at the edge of a dam, washing his intolerably filthy face, trying to remove the stink, drinking his fill. Remarkably the bottle in his sack had survived his fall, his mad dash. Relieved, he lowered it into the water, letting it fill.

  Behind him the hue and cry must have been continuing but there in the cool reeds, screened from searchers by the growth, he felt safe. Hearing no voices, seeing no lights, he had to assume the pursuers had given up or had gone the wrong way.

  He fell asleep there, after eating the bread, mould and all. It tasted disgusting but he was far too hungry not to eat it. Finally, he felt safe enough to sleep, and for a time he was more tired than he was hungry, more tired than he was thirsty. He did not even notice the cold that night. He had been cold before, and cold was nowhere near as intolerable as cold and hungry.

  Before Johnny Star, a small fire flickered, no wood there to burn. They had r
un out of wood days ago, even run out of the tiny sticks that burn too fast throwing a lot of light but not near enough heat. Fortunately, dry dung burns well, producing adequate heat with little flame, once you waste some sticks to get it burning. They could still boil the foul, muddy water from the dam, make it safe to drink, or safer at least.

  It was no use at night, though; there was nowhere near enough light to see by, only a pale warm glow. Fire and water, two things that loomed greatest in the lives of the Natives. They were the sacraments, the bible of the bush, they were life itself as much as they were death to each other.

  Water had an importance to the Settlers too, yet to them it was not yet a sacred commodity, for to them, where they had come from, water was much too common. Settlers had come to this land in search of wealth, in search of gold. Most of them never learnt, often dying from the lack of knowledge, that water is far more valuable. You can live without money.

  You would have thought that a dung fire would smell but for some reason it did not, or at least not as much as a wood fire. Strange that a fire of manure, filthy and foul-smelling when fresh, would smell less than a fire of clean wood. Not the only mystery in the world, and not worth wasting much thought on, but a mystery nevertheless.

  The main problem with a fire of dung was that the fuel – best to think of it as simply fuel – did not collapse when burned away. After a time there was a pile of ash, still dung-shaped, still the same size as it was. Anyone moving the dung, if they managed to not burn themselves, for red-hot dung coals looked as dead as spent coals, would discover they were almost weightless.

  Yet you had to move the dung lest its ashes smother the fire, fill and strangle the fire pit. If you piled more dung on top all you got in the end was a huge pile of smouldering dung.